My mental circus, inside and out.

 

My mother has a weed growing in her brain.  Even though the surgeon has removed it from the surface of her left front lobe, it has sent its roots deep where they can’t be dug out.  Sometimes I think of it as a dandelion gone to seed and spreading its spores, or bindweed, sending its tendrils out everywhere to fill the garden, strangling the flowers, returning no matter what the gardener does to rip it up.  A stubborn, anarchic weed, gioblastoma multiforme.

Today I visited my mother.  We sat  together on the couch, as we always have on so many other occasions before the tumor.  I picked up a book of world poetry and randomly chose The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.  She sat quietly as I read of the mariner's slaying of the albatross, his hallucinations as he sailed on the ghost ship, and his repentant return home.  The slaying of the albatross:  such a small event to set cascading the gruesome series of events.   My mother had never heard the poem; she was surprised to recognize the lines she had heard many times, "Water, water everywhere/Nor any drop to drink."  She gasped when the albatross returned, when the sailors died, when the ghost ship sank.  But at the end, as the mariner bids farewell to the wedding guest who has heard his tale, my mother simply said, "That's all?"

Posted by: EmmaPele at February 28, 2005 00:43 | link | comments (1)

Cremaster

 The hero's cycle begins with a pasty Scot in a pink plaid tartan with a bloody silk rag stuck in his mouth.  He athletically scales the circular levels of the Guggenheim, past women tapping their pointy black shoes against the wall making a sound like a typewriter. He meets an oracle amputee with clear plastic legs like a perverse Olympia, but when she embraces him she turns into a cat woman with legs reminiscent of the aliens in Arrival.  She tears a piece of flesh from his shoulder.  He descends and embraces a wee lamb. Then he returns to slay the cat beast and restores his masculinity by heaving caber-like plastic logs into what appears to be a slain goat with a head in the shape of a trumpet.  

Another striking scene:  a giant with legs made from large pink hibiscus walks through his palace into a pond full of yellow ping pong balls.  Mermaids weave ribbons around his genital area which at first seems as undifferentiated as a doll's.  The ribbons are tied to pigeons or doves that fly in circles around his head until under the water large testicles are drawn out of his body.   Matthew Barney's obsession, the cremaster muscle which surrounds the scrotum,  can pull the testicles into the body.  It can keep the testicles from descending.   The films are fixated on forms that are not-quite-yet or something-familiar-but-other.  Fear, anxiety, desire, beauty, horror, fascination play around these images.  Barney's married to Bjork.  They've made an Icelandic baby.

Posted by: EmmaPele at February 26, 2005 03:10 | link | comments (1)